This is not my beautiful house
Or, How I Got Here.
Like everyone else, I moved in the general direction of Hollywood to make movies (I don’t want the sexy jobs, though, I like fixing shit and resetting food plates a gazillion times during eating scenes), all the while braced to take anything I could get to pay the bills. I’d been in temp hell for three years prior to the move, and I stuck to the game I knew best once I was here. My old agency was not crushing it in terms of assignments, though, so I signed on with another one, which entailed a bizarrely hostile interview in which a total stranger told me I was lying about having interviewed recently for a position at a new Target...not that she doubted the interview, I don’t think? But she doubted the existence of the Target, which could be seen in construction from the freeway, and also WHO THE HELL LIES ABOUT A TARGET WHAT THE SWEET FUCK. Anyway, the next day, I get the call that they need someone for a one-week thing at a ritzy construction business, so I get up and go. The place seems nice, and any work is good work.
In retrospect, I think I should have taken it a little more seriously when, on my second day, one of the company owners told me she’d been self-medicating with booze to cope with some former employees’ shenanigans. But, hey, it’s only going to be a week.
The thing I just found out is that it was never intended to be a week. They had told the World’s Sketchiest Temp Agency that they needed someone they could hire, who knew Quickbooks (I didn’t, as stated during my registration, but I learned), because the old desk manager was building up death piles of paperwork, in addition to ending up in the hospital from stress. So every week, I’d say I didn’t know if I’d be back, and every week, the other employees would think I was really eccentric or nervous. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I also came to find out that in the previous three years, fully six people had burned out in my position and just left. In retrospect, there’s a trail of VERY EVIL BREADCRUMBS leading me to the quasi-functional hell from which I blog.